Since the beginnings of monotheism, religion has seemed to be at war with sexuality and with women. From the crusades of Hebrew prophets against the fertility deities of Canaan, to contemporary Catholic campaigns against contraception and homosexuality, to the suppression of women in Islam, Western religions have demonized both Eros and femininity. In Socrates and Diotima, Andrea Nye draws on the teaching of Socrates's priestly mentor in "matters of love" in the Symposium to recover the sacred Eros that constitutes in many pre-monotheist religious traditions a transcendent spark of...

Reading, Feminism and Spirituality tackles the often tricky relationship between feminism and religion. Through wide-ranging analysis, Dawn Llewellyn explores the generational and secular meanings of the feminist "wave" metaphor, highlighting the disconnections it creates between feminist cohorts, and feminist studies and religious feminisms. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research, she uses women's spiritual reading practices to uncover new commonalities between second and third wave, and sacred and secular, experiences. Her lively approach highlights the importance of reading cultures in...

In the current English-language publication market, this book is one of the earliest academic monographs to comparatively investigate different feminist scholars and academic feminism across the Taiwan Strait.

Hind draws on poetry, short stories, plays, novels, photographs, personal correspondence, advertising, and interviews to make visible the anti-feminine tendencies in femmenism and to imagine a femmenism that will appeal to the next generation of women.

Jane Flax argues that a reciprocal relationship exists between unconscious processes and race/gender domination and that unless we attend to these unconscious processes, no adequate remedy for the malignant consequences of our current race/gender practices and relations can be devised. Flax supports her arguments using a variety of sources.

Through a series of close readings of most of Rousseau's major writings, this book provides a new interpretation of the eighteenth-century philosopher's sexual politics. The text argues that Rousseau's writings provide a critique of not only normative gender identity, but also normative familial and kinship relations.

Although Hegel and feminism seem an unlikely couple, Hegelian philosophy played a prominent part in the thinking of groundbreaking feminist philosophers from Simone de Beauvoir to Luce Irigaray. This book offers a new generation of feminist readings of Hegel from leading scholars in the both fields. Through close readings and innovative arguments, this book makes a significant contribution to the debate on gender and provides insight into philosophical method.

In an important new book, Laura Gillman argues that in this post-identity politics era, identities can still yield reliable knowledge. Focusing on womanist and mestiza theoretical writings, literary texts, and popular cultural representations, Gillman advances a comparative theoretical model of identity and consciousness that foregrounds a naturalist-realist account. She demonstrates that reason and knowledge originate from diverse human practices enacted in the social and natural world and can be explained and justified entirely in terms of them.

Theory on the Edge brings together some of the foremost specialists working at the interdisciplinary interface between Irish Studies, feminist theory, queer theory, and gender and sexuality studies in order to trace the contemporary development of feminist thinking and activism in Ireland.

In these eleven essays scholars from diverse disciplines address the argument, reception, and implications of The Dialectic of Sex and make a compelling, critical case for its contemporary salience.